The play is set between 1989 and 1991, the last two years of the life of Gladys Green, an 85 year old woman who runs a small art gallery in New York's Greenwich Village. She lives on her own near the gallery, but she is watched over by an adoring grandson (Daniel) who lives in the same building, and by a doting daughter (Ellen) and son-in-law (Howard), who live uptown from her. Gladys can’t hear very well and she has diabetes, but otherwise she is doing well enough. From this point we watch Gladys gradually lose some of her mental capabilities, mostly memory. Our attention is directed to how the family responds and comes to grips with her deterioration. Aware of Gladys’ past before she opened her gallery as an activist lawyer with a frenetic lifestyle, Daniel lays out a strategy the family adopts: “she’s got to have something to do.” Their chief tactic is to keep Gladys in the gallery where she could mix with people, keying off what she said keeps her sane: “Everyone needs someone to talk to, otherwise you’d just go nutty. I love to talk to people.” This approach works for a while, and mainly through permitting a young artist (Don), who has never before sold a painting, to exhibit his work in the gallery. Don keeps Gladys company and talks to her. He thinks he notices her hearing problem worsening, but Howard tells him, "I’m afraid that’s more her memory than her hearing aid.” What speeds up her deterioration, however, is the gallery losing its lease when the owner of the space decides to turn it into a cafe. A path ensues that is familiar to many people who have been close to a person losing memory and other mental functions with age. The family desperately wants to keep Gladys as independent as possible, but they need more help as time passes. She can stay in her own apartment for awhile with visiting nurses and aides, but eventually she needs to move in with Ellen and Howard; they never liked the idea of putting her in a nursing home, and they never did. In an aside directed at the audience, Daniel describes what his mother did for Gladys thereafter: she “took care of her, dressed her and cleaned her up and fed her and watched her fall apart, day in and day out with nothing to stop it and no relief in sight.” It did end, though, two months later when Gladys died in Ellen’s home.

First published in 1898, Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” has been ably adapted as a short play by
physician-playwright, Guy Fredrick Glass. In addition to the original
characters, in his adaptation Glass has added a new character, a medical
student, Boris, as a foil and interlocutor for the work’s main character, Dr.
Korolyov. Staging directions and scene setting also add dramatic dimensions to
the story, as do elaborations of conversations including comedic encounters with the governess, Christina Dmitryevna, and a display of "compassionate solidarity" (see Coulehan annotation ) with the
doctor’s patient, Liza. The primary theme of the story stays true in this
adaptation—Korolyov’s impressions of the patient viewed from a cold objective
stance are changed as he develops personal insights into the social and
political nature of her (and his) malaise.

The play has two characters: Ruth and Friend (who is a male doctor).Ruth is an engaging, straight-talking quadriplegic who can zip and dance with her chin-operated wheelchair and takes delight in terrorizing medical staff both physically and verbally. She wants to write poetry and is waiting for a device to make it possible for her to use a computer. She keeps developing bedsores that threaten her life and require long admissions to the hospital before they will heal. She desperately wants to live no matter what happens, as she feels that having no mind would be worse than having no body.Friend is a male doctor with children who is ashamed of having examined her while she was unaware. Burdened with his guilt, he asks to be her “friend.” Ruth is skeptical and runs circles around him, but eventually comes to trust him and believe in his sincerity.She makes him a witness to her advance directive to instigate all heroic measures, as she is afraid of the kindly "ethical" and cost-effective arguments not to treat the disabled. But Ruth dies horribly from sepsis, and Friend is helpless to prevent it. She never obtains the device that would have allowed her to put her poems into printed words.

Evan Hansen, an awkward, lonely high school senior, struggles
with Social Anxiety Disorder. On the
advice of his therapist, he pens supportive letters to himself:
“Dear Evan Hansen, Today is going to be an amazing day, and
here’s why. Because today all you have
to do is be yourself. But also
confident.”

Connor, another loner student, picks up one of Evan’s
letters and, several days later, commits suicide. When Connor’s parents find the letter, they take
it to be their son’s suicide note. Instead
of dissuading them, Evan concocts an account of a close friendship with the
classmate he barely knew, creating an email trail. Connor’s family swallows the
story.

As Evan gains the attention he has always craved and comes
out of his shell, he finds that he cannot stop himself. He
founds the “Connor Project,” an organization dedicated to preserving his “friend’s”
memory where he shares his musings on social media: “Have you ever felt like nobody was
there? Have you ever felt forgotten in
the middle of nowhere? Have you ever
felt like you could disappear? Like you
could fall, and no one would hear? ...Well, let that lonely feeling wash
away…Lift your head and look around. You
will be found. You will be found.” Once Evan’s postings go viral, the Connor
Project becomes a veritable industry, with a budget, and fans who look to it
for inspiration. As the stakes rise, the
Project can flourish only by being fed more lies.

This annotation is based on a live performance presented by the Manhattan Theater Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in New
York City that ran between April and June of 2016. The play was nominated for a 2016 Tony Award for best play, and Frank Langella won the 2016 Tony Award for best
performance by an actor in a leading role in a play. In supporting roles were
Kathryn Erbe, Brian Avers, Charles Borland, Hannah Cabell, and Kathleen
McNenny.

The Father is the story of an older man with
Alzheimer’s disease (André) and his progression through first living on his
own, then living with his daughter (Anne), and finally living in a nursing
home. Or, is it? It’s hard to tell, and that is the intention of the playwright,
Florian Zeller, who told The Guardian
(2015), “The Father is about an old man lost in the labyrinth of his mind.” The
objective of the play is to bring audience members into the actual dementia
experience so that rather than witnessing André’s disorientation they feel his disorientation.

The director, Doug Hughes, creates the audience
experience through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated
scene sequences, and time loops as contexts for various symptom manifestations
like memory loss, paranoia, anger, and lasciviousness. All the scenes take
place in one room that serves at different times as André’s flat, Anne’s flat,
and a nursing home room. The furnishings of the room change based on the
supposed setting, but the walls are exactly the same for all of them. In
different scenes, André is not always sure where he is, and neither is the
audience.

Early in the play, André hears Anne tell him
she’s relocating from Paris to London with her lover, but she is present to him in most of
the scenes thereafter and until the end of the play when he’s told by a nurse that Anne had
moved to London some time ago. Had she really left Paris and was never actually there in all those other scenes? He wonders and so does the audience. In other
scenes, the way characters from the past and present enter and exit distorts
time for André, and so while audience members know the linear trajectory of the
disease course, they can’t be sure of where they are in that course during a
given scene. With the last scene taking place in André’s nursing home room with
the same walls seen in his flat and Anne’s flat, the audience can’t be faulted
for wondering whether all that came before was just one of André’s
hallucinations.

The play does not keep audience members in a
perpetual state of confusion and despondency. Farcical elements are peppered
throughout that produce occasional laughs, such as when Anne contests André’s
account of a previous conversation, he suggests it’s she who has the memory
problem:
“You’ve forgotten. Listen, Anne, I have a feeling
you sometimes suffer from memory loss. You do, I’m telling you. It’s worrying
me. Haven’t you noticed?”

The play is set in 1947 (the year it premiered) in New
Orleans. Having lost their ancestral
Mississippi home to creditors, Blanche Dubois arrives at the shabby French
Quarter flat of her sister Stella. When
we first meet Blanche she explains she is on a leave of absence from teaching
high school English on account of her “nerves.” From her first meeting with
Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski, a World War II vet, we detect class conflict
and sexual tension between the two of them. As Blanche’s visit becomes more and more protracted, Stanley becomes
increasingly suspicious of her motives and background. Meanwhile, she begins to date Mitch, one of
Stanley’s poker buddies. Gradually we learn more about Blanche’s checkered past.
She was once married to a young man who committed suicide after she discovered
him in a sexual encounter with another man. Stanley uncovers rumors that she was fired from her teaching job for
having sex with a student. As the play
progresses, fueled by her surreptitious drinking, Blanche’s mental state
unravels. When Stanley warns Mitch about Blanche’s notorious reputation, Mitch
rejects her. Adding insult to injury,
while Stella is having a baby, Stanley rapes his sister-in-law. Blanche’s emotional deterioration is complete. In the final scene, a doctor and nurse arrive
to take Blanche to a mental hospital. She initially resists them, but when the doctor helps her up she
willingly surrenders: “Whoever you are - I have always depended on the kindness
of strangers"(p. 178).

This is a
collection of essays by (mostly British) artists, performers, and academics on
the intersection between medicine and theater.
It appears in a series entitled “Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary
Dialogues” put out by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. The
introduction makes it clear there are many points of convergence beyond the
scope of this volume, such as how medicine is depicted in plays and therapeutic
uses of theater (e.g. drama therapy). The focus
here, then, is on “the ways in which the body is understood, displayed and
represented in performance” (p. 11). And
the “medical body” of the title refers to one that is ’acted upon’ by illness
or disability and/or by the diagnostic and therapeutic activities of the
medical profession” (Ibid).

The book is divided into three sections: “Performing the
Medical,” “Performing Patients,” and “Performing Body Parts.” The first section includes an essay by Roger
Kneebone, a surgeon, who explores the parallels between his field and theatrical
performance. Kneebone has devised simulations
that enable laypersons to get a sense of what it is like to participate in
surgery. In his view, this encourages cross-fertilization
of ideas. For example, his collaboration
with a jazz pianist has demonstrated to him that musical improvisation, in its
spontaneity, is somewhat like emergency surgery. And his work with a choreographer led to the
development of a dance piece depicting the movements of a surgical team during
a procedure.

In the second section we read about Brian Lobel, a theater
artist who has used his experience with testicular cancer to create a solo performance
piece entitled “BALL.” This not only allowed
Lobel to “regain a sense of mastery over the illness experience” (p. 88), but
has also earned him a niche within the theater community. Lobel now works with other cancer sufferers
helping them develop their own narratives in a project called “Fun with Cancer
Patients.”

The final section of the book includes a description of “Under
Glass,” a forty-minute performance piece consisting of eight specimen jars each
containing a solo performer, said to be “at once museum exhibit, gallery and
medical laboratory” (p. 141), which also provides the book's front cover image. "Under Glass" was devised by Clod Ensemble, whose Performing Medicine
project is known for its teaching programs in numerous London medical schools. Meant to provoke discourse about the public
display of specimens, it brings to mind the Victorian “freak show” as
well as the more recent controversial touring Body Worlds exhibition of
plastinated cadavers and body parts.

4:48 Psychosis was the last work of controversial British
playwright Sarah Kane. In 1999, soon
after her twenty-eighth birthday, having completed the play, she took her own
life.

Naturally, these tragic circumstances can never be far from
the reader’s mind. But to dismiss 4:48 Psychosis as a suicide note is to negate
Kane’s achievement. The play was, in
fact, meticulously researched and carefully written. Kane’s first play, Blasted,
had considerable shock value, and throughout her short career she pushed the
boundaries of what might be considered stageworthy. 4:48 Psychosis is both the
final product of a life marked by recurrent episodes of depression (the play
gets its name from the time she found herself waking up every day during the last episode) and the final
chapter in her writing’s progression towards disintegration. It represents her
deteriorating mental state, but is also a conscious stylistic decision.

The text of 4:48 Psychosis is unrecognizable as a conventional
play. The author has left neither stage
directions nor an indication of the number or gender of performers. Words and
numbers appear to be arranged ornamentally on the page. However, meaning that
is not apparent emerges from the chaos, as in the way that sense may be
made from a psychotic mind. The numbers
are not random, but “serial 7’s” from the mental status exam. Quotations from the Book of Revelations appear
side by side with excerpts from a medical chart, and extracts from self-help
books are interspersed with dialogue between a patient and her
psychiatrist. The latter provides an
illustration of the patient’s attempt to reconcile her anger with her
neediness: “I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing”
(p. 214). We learn too of her struggle with self-mutilation and her suicidal
impulses, and follow her moods from dark humor to despair to hopefulness. Indeed, the last line of the play, “Please
open the curtains” (p. 245) appears to leave open the possibility that she will
pull through. That option was
unfortunately not the one the author chose for herself.

Meet the Goodmans, (father Dan, mother Diana, daughter
Natalie) who on the surface resemble a “perfect loving family” like any one of
millions. However, from the outset we
see that they are, in fact, a hair’s breadth from collapse: Diana’s long-term struggle with bipolar disorder
leaves her suffering uncontrollable mood swings. Her illness fuels the chronic tension in her
relationships with husband and daughter.
In addition, we learn that a son (Gabe), whom we initially believe to be
an active family member, actually died years ago and his appearances represent
Diana’s hallucination.

As the show begins, Diana is undergoing a hypomanic episode that
is resistant to treatment by her psychopharmacologist. Discouraged by side effects and egged on by
her phantom son, Diana flushes her pills down the toilet. As she deteriorates, she visits a new
psychiatrist who agrees at first to treat her without medication. As she begins in psychotherapy, for the first
time, to accept the loss of her son, she descends to a new clinical low. At the close of the first act, after making a
suicide attempt, she is hospitalized and agrees to be treated with ECT.

By Act II, the ECT has effected great clinical improvement,
with stabilization of Diana’s mood and no further hallucinations. All this, however, has come at the expense of
her memory. As it returns, she becomes
aware that what she most needs to remember, and process, are her feelings about
losing a child. In fact, we learn that she
was kept from expressing them at the time because of concerns she might
decompensate. She struggles to make
sense of all of this while remaining stable.
When she confronts Dan about Gabe, it is he who appears unable to
discuss their loss. She suddenly becomes
aware that Dan has been enabling her in an unhealthy way. She reconciles with her daughter, but realizes
that in order to move forward she needs to get out of her dysfunctional marriage. However, the door is left open on this
relationship, for at the recommendation of her psychiatrist Dan enters
psychotherapy.

This is a book about
the author's passionate love affair with ancient Greek plays, how he goes
beyond merely making them relevant to our time by finding therapeutic benefit
in them, and how he finds ways to adapt them for a variety of populations and
uses.

Doerries begins by telling us about two formative relationships, representing
opposite extremes, that have influenced his worldview. In the first case,
we learn how his father, a diabetic, effectively commits suicide over a period
of decades by gorging himself on sweets. He rationalizes his behavior to his
son by suggesting that, no matter what he does, his life is destined to end in
disaster anyway like "those Greek plays." (p. 17) In contrast, we
hear of the author's relationship with a young woman, doomed by cystic
fibrosis, who manages to make every moment of her all-too-brief life matter.
She goes on to provide an object lesson in how to die with grace and dignity.
These experiences afford Doerries an insight into mortality beyond his
years. He also gains insight into his own destiny, eschewing an academic career
for a path of his own making. He follows his intuition which tells him
"If I could present readings...maybe something healing could happen."
(p. 66) He then begins to devise his own translations from the original Greek
which he directs in dramatic readings, and he seeks out the audiences that will
benefit from them.

One of the plays that captures his imagination, Sophocles's "Ajax,"
tells of a warrior who loses his friend to war, becomes despondent, and takes
his own life. Doerries discovers that this storyline is familiar territory to
sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Consequently, when he
presents it at military bases it produces an abreactive effect. Indeed,
the pent-up emotion he elicits has no other outlet, and he and his performers
become folk heroes. Of course, there are detractors as well.

In the remainder of the book, Doerries finds additional applications for his
method, from prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to hospice providers to victims of
natural disasters.